Monday, December 17, 2012

The Unbidden Price Of 'Knowing Better'"

Snobbery Alert:The following post may leave an unpleasant
aftertaste due to intuited undertones of latent snobbery.Let it be known that this soupcon of
superiority is an inextricably unfortunate and totally unintended consequence
of my writing about the subject in question, acknowledging that were I a better
writer, you would not even know it was in there.

My apologies ahead of
time for any inadvertent offense.I mean
it.

Remember Eliza Doolittle from the play Pygmalion or the musical derived
from the play My Fair Lady, Eliza
Doolittle being a working class girl with working class habits, who was
elevated in language and behavior, the resultant transformation making her
subsequently unfit to return to her earlier condition?

That’s exactly what happened to me.Only with restaurant food.

When I first arrived in Los Angeles – not that Toronto was a
culinary wasteland, the waffles at Fran’s
were not to be believed; ditto the Noshery’s
“Kishka-a-la-Tony” and the chocolate cream pie at Bassell’s – anyway, when I first hit L.A., there were certain
restaurants I patronized where the cuisine was, to my palate, absolutely First Class.

I recall one steak restaurant which dazzled my taste buds by
my New York strip doused in teriyaki sauce which I had never tasted before, and
a dining institution which, with the exception of the Town and Country, a Toronto all-you-can-eat” restaurant, I had
never experienced before, and never anywhere
in such opulence, that institution being the “Salad Bar.”

Imagine, piling your plate high with all the jicama you
could possibly consume.And by the way,
I had never tasted jicama before either.

There were a number of notable eateries of that standard. I recall a seaside fish restaurant I also rated
“Top-Of-The-Line.”How could it not be?We had an ocean right next door; the seafood just walked up the beach
and got cooked.A fortuitous outcome for
diners, though unfortunate for the watery denizens themselves.

GRILLING SWORDFISH: I just came up to use the phone.

Years passed.Precisely, three of them.I run
into Dr. M.We marry. And a year-minus-a-day later, we are blessed
with the arrival of our magnificent daughter, Anna.

From that point on, between the two of them, as with Eliza
Doolittle’s “haich”- dropping dialect, my entire eating apparatus was radically
and irreversibly transformed.

Call it a “Gustatorial Makeover.”Over the proceeding years, I was entirely re-educated,
trained by acknowledged experts to distinguish the merely “serviceable” meal from
the “truly outstanding.”I asked Anna,
for this blog post, to explain to me the difference between great food and what
I had hitherto considered great food,
but, I was taught to realize, was merely “okay.”

She mentioned the fresh ingredients, the subtle seasonings, an
original, perhaps groundbreaking, blending of flavors.This combination, and undoubtedly others I am
unqualified to talk about, produce a culinary result that makes your taste-sensitive
mouth parts and the area of your brain connected to them dance and sing,
sending you racing into the kitchen to hug the chef.

Let me stop here to assure you that I am not talking – or at
least not just talking – about prohibitively upscale restaurants with their
not provided “If you have to ask, then you can’t afford it” prices.We have
been known, on special occasions, to splurge on some “multi-starred” hot spot,
only to, surprisingly frequently, find them unworthy of their reputations.Or their exorbitance.

On the other hand, I regularly frequent a reasonably-priced diner
serving incomparable oatmeal, and another who’s mango-macadamia pancakes alone
make life entirely worth living.Yet another
budget-friendly bistro serves the most moist and flavorful chickenburger in Los
Angeles.

Proving price is not necessarily the issue, there are a
handful of dining spots offering coffee with the tantalizing aroma of the
country the beans were grown in, while other restaurants – for virtually the same price – dish out a concoction that tastes
like boiling water with a coffee-flavored crayon melted in it.

The common denominator, it seems to me, is not the
comparative opulence, but the difference between the restaurants that care and restaurants
that think they care but if they ate
at the restaurants that really care
would realize that they need to care more.

Of course, this entire what-I’m-talking-about-here could all
merely be subjective, a situation where the restaurant you swear by, I find just
ordinary, and equally and most undeniably vice versa.I retain in my mind a culinary ideal, but
that could be entirely imagined, a fabricated illusion I invented to make
myself feel superior.

Let me qualify that.I didn’t invent it.If it was invented at all – in contrast to
being actually the case – this qualitative differentiation was arrived at by by
others, and drummed relentlessly into my brain place.And subsequently, my culinary receptors.

From a practical standpoint, none of this really matters.What matters is there are now a frustratingly
few restaurants that rise to standard of quality I’ve been tutored to
appreciate.The rest are “good enough”,
but I invariably pay the bill with the dogged by the nagging feeling that what
I had ordered turned out to be disappointingly not great.

I never used to feel that way.Not to say that I was a major consumer of
fast food.I was not, an inner voice telling me insistently to steer clear. (The one exception being Toronto’s first
flame-broiled drive-through hamburger outlet called The Red Barn, whose freshly made burgers sold for nineteen cents a
pop.I had a joke once, “I don’t know
what my hamburger had in it, but when
I walked by a mounted policeman, his horse started to cry.”)

The question comes down to evaluating the benefits of this significant
trade-off.I have undoubtedly developed
a more educated palate, but, as a consequence, I have a considerably diminished
number of dining options that do not leave me continually disappointed.

2 comments:

Sidebar, relating to a previous post: Another example of the middle ground between broadcast and premium cable over the weekend, as Lifetime premiered "Merry In-Laws," featuring clumsy, expositional dialogue, a character who's supposed to be a scientist referring to Stephen "Hawkings," and, in a kitchen scene, crew members visible in a reflection on the shiny refrigerator. (Last time I'll mention any of this.)

It's true the palate does develop refined taste, but it's also true that great food isn't always found in expensive restaurants. There are markets in Italy that sell better food than you'll get in restaurants, because the ingredients are often fresher.